The Washington Post ran a lengthy item today — on its front page, no less — on Barack Obama’s admitted experimentation with drugs as a teenager.
Long before the national media spotlight began to shine on every twist and turn of his life’s journey, Barack Obama had this to say about himself: “Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. . . . I got high [to] push questions of who I was out of my mind.”
The Democratic senator from Illinois and likely presidential candidate offered the confession in a memoir written 11 years ago, not long after he graduated from law school and well before he contemplated life on the national stage. [...]
Obama’s revelations were not an issue during his Senate campaign two years ago. But now his open narrative of early, bad choices, including drug use starting in high school and ending in college, as well as his tortured search for racial identity, are sure to receive new scrutiny.
They are? Why, exactly, are they “sure to receive new scrutiny”? Because bored political reporters say so?
It's an old story that seems to have no political relevance at all. The Post suggests that the drug issue might become important, and then quotes experts from both sides of the aisle saying it won’t be important at all.
Welcome to The Silly Season.
